Canon Fodder is primarily a podcast cataloguing of Peter Benson’s journey through the video game canon. Each episode will focus on a particular game in the video game canon.
I’m Peter and having played games for what feels like most of my life, I am often reminded when engaging with it via social media or discussing with friends and strangers that I really haven’t experienced much of what the art form has to offer. If I ever want to write about it, be critical of it, or simply better understand what it is to game, I need to play more.
But I don’t just want to play random games to figure it out. Even if that would be a perfectly reasonable way to engage with games, I feel like I have limited time to play along with everything else that happens in my life. I have a new wife, a full-time job and other hobbies. As the old cliche goes, it’s too short for a lot of things, including playing bad games.
So I don’t plan to do that. Instead the plan is to play through what critics have, over time, decided are the best games ever. These include the most influential games of all time, and likely some of the most unique games of all time as well as simply the best, what ever those meant to them at the time of ranking them.
Multiple websites have gone through the painstaking task of cataloguing, cross-referencing, and calculating an ungodly amount of critics’ lists amassed over time. I have taken their rankings and tried to take an average ranking — more on that below — to try to determine which games unequivocally belong in the canon of video games.
I have established a rough look at the canon. I now become the fodder.
Before I get to the really fun stuff, let’s talk numbers. Having done a fair bit of scratching around for some lists, 4 websites rose to the top. A Mount Rushmore of video game canon chroniclers, if you will.
The first list I felt comfortable using was oddly a list on IGN’s website from user RuFiOoo . They have made a list titled “The Mathematically Derived 500 Best Video Games of All Time .” This list, most recently updated in the fall of 2024, ran analysis over 85 lists cataloguing the greatest games of all time and came up with the top 500 based on that analysis.
After that, I discovered pwnRank . This list did a similar thing, running the numbers on over 85 lists to come up with its own top 500 . The major difference between pwnRank and RuFiOoo’s is pwnRank limited its analysis to recent lists, taking only from those written in the last 8 years.
Next came Video Game Canon . If I had discovered this list first, I might have just stopped here given the name. However, the methodology isn’t quite as robust as the others, only choosing to work from 76 GOAT lists. However, the site does have a top 1000 instead of a top 500.
Finally, Play That Game , a UK-based website also did a meta analysis. This is by far the most ambitious project trying to capture the canon with PTG having trawled through more than 3000 lists to create a meta analysis of, at the very least, the most talked about video games of all time, if not the greatest.
The website boasts an impressive top 2000 list as well as a more detailed look at its top 250 . However, despite having options to locate games from every year since 1962, its most recent entry is from 2021 so isn’t as well maintained as the others in terms of adding new games. Yet, at least.
Because all of the lists have flaws, I figured it made sense to try to determine which games made all or most of these lists. I added every game that appeared in at least one top 500. There were 758 games in total. 265 of them appeared in all 4.
It felt unfair to opt for ones that only managed to crack all of them. Especially those that ranked highly in two and were left off others (see Elden Ring) or that made three out of the four. So for every time a game didn’t appear in a list, I gave the game a ranking of 999 (the largest three-digit number) in that list. I then averaged out all of the rankings with these ‘control’ numbers in place.
I then determined — somewhat arbitrarily but it made some sense to me — that any game with an average ranking of 600 or below deserved my time and attention. This method immediately weeded out any games that ranked lowly on one or two lists but didn’t appear on others. It helped remove those that snuck onto just one too.
This methodology led to 418 games that qualified to be played as Canon Fodder, as I began this project. This number has since changed as more have been added and some have fallen off the list.
Unfortunately I still wasn’t done. While I do endeavor to play most of the games that I now believe can be dubbed the canon of video gaming history, there are some games that don’t make sense to play. Of the 418 that qualified of the first analysis, I decided that I won’t play 34 of those for various reasons.
Some are obvious. Games that I decided were good for this exercise had to be able to be finished in a reasonable time. This meant that the first to be deemed “unplayable” were live-service-style games like Fortnite, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), and Apex Legends. All of these games offer continuous reasons to play via seasonal updates and so made little sense to include for reviews. For what it’s worth, I have dabbled in Fortnite and played Apex pretty extensively and enjoyed them greatly at the time but I am opting out of reviewing them as I didn’t really want to end up reviewing one specific season of these games as opposed to view them as a whole.
The same logic is applied to games like World of Warcraft and other MMORPGS, as well as things like Eve Online and Phantasy Star Online. There is no way to capture the initial and continued magic these franchises provided early adopters and, in the case of Phantasy Star, the public servers are no longer available (though a community still operates private servers).
Another casualty are franchises that require specific hardware. This category has some of the most obvious — but some of the saddest — games to not be played. It includes the Rock Band and Guitar Hero series, for example. I grew up on Guitar Hero when I still lived in the UK and had a blast playing it but procuring the specific hardware and games is too much to ask at the beginning of this project. I’m not saying never but they are certainly low priority as I take on this large task.
The other side of the hardware limiting access is specific consoles and their availability. This is a problem for the handful of Wii and Wii U games that are on the list and not easily accessible. Given a limited budget, I am focused on acquiring a Switch, as well as Playstation and Xbox consoles that are either of generation or can play older generation games as there is more value in doing so currently. Again not saying never but not before I get through a number of other games.
A perfect example of games being left off for this reason is Wii Sports for the Wii and Super Smash Bros. for Wii U. In the case of the former, it’s one of the few games on the list for the Wii. The latter is being left off because there are plenty other versions playable on other devices that will let me get reviews done of the series as a whole with much less friction.
I will likely publish a full list of games not included in this run at a later date. I wanted to be sure that there were overarching reasons for the omissions and why they won’t be played during the run of this project. That’s if it ever ends.
I’m not naive to think that if I play a game from 1962 that I might get the same enjoyment out of it in 2024 (or whenever I actually get round to playing those older games). It doesn’t mean I shouldn’t try to meet the game where it exists and try to have fun with it.
This section is subject to change. I am sure that as I play different games and different genres, my expectations for the games I play will change. That said, there are a few key criteria I want to continuously come back to when reviewing. These are:
And a couple of things I will not be taking into consideration:
This is a lot I am aware. I don’t expect any game on this list will command this many words but I wanted to have this page laying the ground rules. If this is the first thing you read or something you have come to after finding a couple of my reviews, I wanted this to exist as a reference point for both you, the reader, and me when I inevitably get lost on this journey.
That said, there are just a couple of more general points I want to make before you sample some of my podcast — if this hasn’t turned you off that is
The first is that I will not be playing the games in any particular order. Games will be plucked in a haphazard way so as to keep every edition of the pod fresh and engaging. The only rule I have on sequencing is I will be playing most series on the lists in order.
This is for two main reasons. The first is simply that for story driven games — for example, the Halo series — I want to experience the story in order and critique it. The second is that an order of a series will also help me understand the evolution of the games and critique the jumps from one game to another. It would be silly of me to play a later version of the Civilzation series, as an example, and then go back to the game that started it all and complain about it not having all the quality of life updates the later versions put in.
A final thought is that it is going to take me time to play through all these games and it is likely that some of these websites and lists will update their rankings as new lists propel more recent games into the canon. Where possible I will try to add to the original list and still play as many of the 384 I originally set out to play. That said, if some fall out of that as new ones make way, some might fall by the wayside and I will do my best to communicate any changes to the master list as and when they come with episodes of the pod that focus some part of the ep on that.
My goal is deliver you an episode of the podcast every Monday without fail. Sometimes I imagine life will get in the way and I will ensure to communicate with you when a week will be missed but these will be rare and only with very good reason.
With all that said, it was about time I actually started playing the games. I am thankful to everyone who takes this journey with me. Welcome to Canon Fodder.